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Bones to phones

By Margaret Wertheim

WITH NO books, no tv, no internet, just how did our forebears exercise their
minds around the campfire back in Palaeolithic times? One pastime seems to have
been bone-notching. Across Europe and the Middle East, early humans took to
etching parallel lines and crosses into pieces of bone. Why they did this is
still a mystery, though present thinking is that the bones served as tally
sticks or even a form of lunar calendar. Whatever their purpose, the bones were
clearly important or they would not have been used for so long—about 90
000 years. “I doubt very much that any form of media we have today will survive
anything like as long,” declares Bruce Sterling with heartfelt admiration.

Sterling, a Texas-based science fiction writer, is a man who should know
about such matters. He has spent much of the past five years sifting through the
dustbins of human history in search of defunct media. He and fellow writer Bruce
Kadrey are assembling an archive of the dead and dying—everything from
notched bones to Betamax video tape. Their only criteria are that a device must
have been used to create, store or communicate information, and that it be
deceased—or at least down to its last gasp.

Why go to all this trouble? In the mid-1990s, Sterling realised that in this
digital age of PCs, palmtops, the Internet, chat rooms and virtual reality he
had lost touch with what “media” actually means. Media can be many things, he
argues: an extension of the senses, a mode of consciousness, extra-somatic
memory and a means of social …